Electronic prescribing (e-prescribing), which is intended to ensure that accurate, error-free and understandable prescriptions are sent directly to pharmacies, was found to lower the risks among diabetes patients of experiencing adverse drug events (ADEs) that required emergency department visits or hospitalizations. In an AHRQ-supported article, researchers examined 2011–2013 data for 3.1 million Medicare Part D beneficiaries who were 66 or older and had taken antidiabetes medications for at least 90 days.

Their analysis, published in Medical Care, showed 21 ADEs per 1,000 beneficiaries who had at least 75 percent of their medications e-prescribed. Beneficiaries with less e-prescribing, meanwhile, had more adverse drug events — with the highest rate, 44 events per 1,000 diabetes patients, occurring for those patients who had 0.1 percent to 24.9 percent of their prescriptions handled electronically.

Adverse drug events fell by 67,000 between 2010 and 2013 as the result of the federal “meaningful use” program that offered financial incentives to hospitals for using certified electronic health records (EHRs), according to a new Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) study.
Adverse drug events are harms experienced by a patient as a result of exposure to a medication. They affect nearly 5 percent of hospitalized patients and can be deadly. To minimize such harms, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) initiated the meaningful use program in 2010, awarding financial incentives to hospitals and physicians who adopted specific information technology (IT) capabilities, such as computerized prescriber order entry.
The new AHRQ study in Journal of the American Informatics Association (JAMIA)...